As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism must be
modified in favor of the generalship and organization of the Second
Army-of rare efficiency under the restrictions and authority of the
General Staff. I often used to wonder what qualities belonged to Sir
Herbert Plumer, the army commander. In appearance he was almost
a caricature of an old-time British general, with his ruddy,
pippin-cheeked face, with white hair, and a fierce little white
mustache, and blue, watery eyes, and a little pot-belly and short
legs. He puffed and panted when he walked, and after two minutes in his
company Cyril Maude would have played him to perfection. The staff-work
of his army was as good in detail as any machinery of war may be, and
the tactical direction of the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor
haphazard, as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to
detail and after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle
of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and
worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death
machine. Even the battles of Flanders in the autumn of '17, ghastly as
they were in the losses of our men in the state of the ground through
which they had to fight, and in futile results, were well organized by
the Second Army headquarters, compared with the abominable mismanagement
of other troops, the contrast being visible to every battalion officer
and even to the private soldier. How much share of this was due to Sir
Herbert Plumer it is impossible for me to tell, though it is fair to
give him credit for soundness of judgment in general ideas and in the
choice of men.
He had for his chief of staff Sir John Harington, and beyond all doubt
this general was the organizing brain of to Second Army, though with
punctilious chivalry he gave, always, the credit of all his work to
the army commander. A thin, nervous, highly strung man, with extreme
simplicity of manner and clarity of intelligence, he impressed me as a
brain of the highest temper and quality in staff-work. His memory for
detail was like a card-index system, yet his mind was not clogged with
detail, but saw the wood as well as the trees, and the whole broad sweep
of the problem which confronted him. There was something fascinating as
well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For
the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all
there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always
a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as
I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and
staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a
scientific business, according to the methods of science--calculating
the weight and effect of gun-fire, the strength of the enemy's defenses
and man-power, the psychology of German generalship and of German
units, the pressure which could be put on British troops before the
breaking-point of courage, the relative or cumulative effects of
poison-gas, mines, heavy and light artillery, tanks, the disposition of
German guns and the probability of their movement in this direction or
that, the amount of their wastage under our counter-battery work, the
advantages of attacks in depth--one body of troops “leap-frogging,”
another in an advance to further objectives--the time-table of
transport, the supply of food and water and ammunition, the comfort of
troops before action, and a thousand other factors of success.
Before every battle fought by the Second Army, and of the eve of it, Sir
John Harington sent for the war correspondents and devoted an hour or
more to a detailed explanation of his plans. He put down all his cards
on the table with perfect candor, hiding nothing, neither minimizing nor
exaggerating the difficulties and dangers of the attack, pointing out
the tactical obstacles which must be overcome before any chance of
success, and exposing the general strategy in the simplest and clearest
speech.
I used to study him at those times, and marveled at him. After intense
and prolonged work at all this detail involving the lives of thousands
of men, he was highly wrought, with every nerve in his body and brain
at full tension, but he was never flurried, never irritable, never
depressed or elated by false pessimism or false optimism. He was a
chemist explaining the factors of a great experiment of which the
result was still uncertain. He could only hope for certain results after
careful analysis and synthesis. Yet he was not dehumanized. He laughed
sometimes at surprises he had caused the enemy, or was likely to cause
them--surprises which would lead to a massacre of their men. He warmed
to the glory of the courage of the troops who were carrying out his
plans.
“It depends on these fellows,” he would say. “I am setting them a
difficult job. If they can do it, as I hope and believe, it will be
a fine achievement. They have been very much tried, poor fellows, but
their spirit is still high, as I know from their commanding officers.”
One of his ambitions was to break down the prejudice between the
fighting units and the Staff. “We want them to know that we are all
working together, for the same purpose and with the same zeal. They
cannot do without us, as we cannot do without them, and I want them to
feel that the work done here is to help them to do theirs more easily,
with lighter losses, in better physical conditions, with organization
behind them at every stage.”
Many times the Second Army would not order an attack or decide the time
of it before consulting the divisional generals and brigadiers, and
obtaining their consensus of opinion. The officers and men in the Second
Army did actually come to acknowledge the value of the staff-work behind
them, and felt a confidence in its devotion to their interests which was
rare on the western front.
At the end of one of his expositions Sir John Harington would rise and
gather up his maps and papers, and say:
“Well, there you are, gentlemen. You know as much as I do about the
plans for to-morrow's battle. At the end of the day you will be able to
see the result of all our work and tell me things I do not know.”
Those conferences took place in the Second Army headquarters on Cassel
Hill, in a big building which was a casino before the war, with a
far-reaching view across Flanders, so that one could see in the distance
the whole sweep of the Ypres salient, and southward the country below
Notre Dame de Lorette, with Merville and Hazebrouck in the foreground.
Often we assembled in a glass house, furnished with trestle tables on
which maps were spread, and, thinking back to these scenes, I remember
now, as I write, the noise of rain beating on that glass roof, and the
clammy touch of fog on the window-panes stealing through the cracks and
creeping into the room. The meteorologist of the Second Army was often
a gloomy prophet, and his prophecies were right. How it rained on nights
when hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were waiting in their
trenches to attack in a murky dawn!... We said good night to General
Harington, each one of us, I think, excited by the thought of the drama
of human life and death which we had heard in advance in that glass
house on the hill; to be played out by flesh and blood before many
hours had passed. A kind of sickness took possession of my soul when I
stumbled down the rock path from those headquarters in pitch darkness,
over slabs of stones designed by a casino architect to break one's neck,
with the rain dribbling down one's collar, and, far away, watery lights
in the sky, of gun-flashes and ammunition-dumps afire, and the noise of
artillery thudding in dull, crumbling shocks. We were starting early
to see the opening of the battle and its backwash. There would be more
streams of bloody, muddy men, more crowds of miserable prisoners, more
dead bodies lying in the muck of captured ground, more shells plunging
into the wet earth and throwing up columns of smoke and mud, more dead
horses, disemboweled, and another victory at fearful cost, over one of
the Flanders ridges.
Curses and prayers surged up in my heart. How long was this to go
on--this massacre of youth, this agony of men? Was there no sanity left
in the world that could settle the argument by other means than this?
When we had taken that ridge to-morrow there would be another to take,
and another. And what then? Had we such endless reserves of men that we
could go on gaining ground at such a price? Was it to be extermination
on both sides? The end of civilization itself? General Harington had
said: “The enemy is still very strong. He has plenty of reserves on hand
and he is fighting hard. It won't be a walk-over to-morrow.”
As an onlooker I was overwhelmed by the full measure of all this tragic
drama. The vastness and the duration of its horror appalled me. I went
to my billet in an old monastery, and sat there in the darkness, my
window glimmering with the faint glow of distant shell-flashes, and
said, “O God, give us victory to-morrow, if that may help us to the
end.” Then to bed, without undressing. There was an early start before
the dawn. Major Lytton would be with me. He had a gallant look along the
duckboards... Or Montague--white-haired Montague, who liked to gain a
far objective, whatever the risk, and gave one a little courage by
his apparent fearlessness. I had no courage on those early mornings of
battle. All that I had, which was little, oozed out of me when we came
to the first dead horses and the first dead men, and passed the tumult
of our guns firing out of the mud, and heard the scream of shells. I
hated it all with a cold hatred; and I went on hating it for years
that seem a lifetime. I was not alone in that hatred, and other men had
greater cause, though it was for their sake that I suffered most, as
an observer of their drama of death... As observers we saw most of the
grisly game.